Welcome to Fractal Forums

Hi,

It's great to see the growth of the forum in recent days :)

I'd appreciate a few guidelines for posting. For example, is it better to inline images or post links? Also, with regard to links to commercial sites, what are the guidelines? I received a PM indicating that link-backs are preferred in such a case (which I was happy to oblige). Are there any other guidelines to be aware of?

Many thanks,
Chris

Hi I haven't drawn a comprehensive list of guidelines yet, this kind of thing will be borne out of trial, error and common sense between users and moderators.

I'll share my opinions from experiences over the past few days:

- I much prefer inline images (IMG tags, NOT uploading images to the server!) - link at least one image if you are showing off your own gallery.  Why?  Well it gives a kind of 'teaser trailer' to the forum readers and entices them to follow your link.  If you post a blind link, where's the temptation to click and have a look?

- Taking the above point into consideration, don't post your entire gallery in one page all at once!  Make people come back for more.. post some today, some tomorrow.. Take the forum readers on a journey - explain how one image relates to another for instance.

- About back-links, I'm not going to strike you off if you don't link back to me from a commercial site (commercial meaning either taking payments for products/services OR running advertising).  Please back-link to support the site.  It's simple, fairly painless, FREE and helps us both - you scratch my back I'll scratch yours.  You'll note that this site doesn't run advertising - It may in the future and if it does I'll be more relaxed about this point.

- Please don't post links that are unrelated to Fractals, unless of course you're posting in the 'non fractal related topics' page.  However if you are using a link to explain a point made in a topic, then feel free.

Sound OK?  :)

Sounds great, and thanks!

Just a thought...it might be a good idea to suggest a limit to the size and number of images per post. I know this doesn't mean diddly to some people, but I (and others) have a dial-up connection. Already there are some threads that are getting hard to load because of the images.

For the same reason I am unable to visit some members' sites - if it doesn't load in a few minutes, I back off unless I see something really irresistible starting to appear.

There may be a firefox plugin to help you with auto-resizing or disabling of images.
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Im afraid if you are using a dial up 56k or 64k per second modem thease forums will likely cause you problems.

I like to limit the size of my pictures so that the larget dimention is 1000 pixels as although I like high resolution I see most users having 1024x768, 1280x760, 1280x1024 or simerlar screen resolutions and scrolling around to see the whole image is not what eveyone wants.

People sould be aware of the PNG format and not underestimate it. If optimised properly PNG files can be smaller than JPEG files of the same image. PNG is Especally for fractals as thay often have low colour depth's.

There isn't much point in disabling images if that is what one is going to see, is there? And "resizing" images in the browser is meaningless - the full-size image is being loaded no matter what size it is shown at. I am using K-Meleon (I also have FireFox, and usually Opera, and that awful Micro$not thing too), and I can disable images whenever I want to.

What I am saying above is that it is not really fair to discriminate against people who - for whatever reason - do not have an extremely fast connection. This is a place for minds to meet, not a rich men's club or a macho bragging-fair.

If I want to show off a large image, I will give a thumbnail prieview (a truly small image, not a shrunken view) with an option to view it full size. This is common courtesy, not demanding that the viewer meet certain standards just to have a peek.